Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  The crowd picked up again. She’d missed her window. I did this for you, she should have said, and if you’re not enjoying yourselves, it’s because you don’t know how hard this was.

  Pascal was hurrying up the hill to where Cory was standing, rolling her ankle on a hidden pothole and tumbling down, shouting across the remaining distance: “There’s a problem!” She pointed southeast.

  “What is it?”

  At Eighteenth and Dolores, some three dozen people had gathered. Cory cantered down the hill, juking around off-leash dogs and toppled garbage cans, across the barricade of gray porta-potties, the curvy inflatable couches by the Red Bull Blogger Tent, the booth babes at the Levi’s Letterpress Kiosk and the PBR Cheap-It-Real Merch Station, and dodged under the drinking cordon to reach the edge of the crowd. She turned her staff badge to face outward, then searched for a leader in the enviably diverse multitude, which included white girls in zebra-striped bikinis and pink boas, working-class Latinos, middle-aged couples with toddlers, drag queens, Valencia hipsters in plaid shirts and black glasses. A large adult tricycle blared “Fat Bottomed Girls” from a mounted speaker. A portable grill and trampoline were in use, and people held fluorescent signs, implacable placards in stencil and marker and printout:

  ¡¡¡¡¡BASTA!!!!!

  CORPORATE WHORES

  KEEP YR PRIVATES

  OUTTA MY PUBLIC AREA

  RENTERS & OWNERS

  4

  PEACE & QUIET

  Nearby, a short woman with curly bobby-pinned hair held a sign that said KEEP DOLORES LOCAL. Cory tried explaining that Recreate was all about community, and Socialize itself was a local nonprofit, that the corporate sponsorship was minimal. The woman had valid, civilized rebuttals about preserving the park’s noncommercialism, but she declined Cory’s offer to discuss it later in a public forum (“This is a public forum, and we’re trying to keep it that way”).

  They attracted other protestors, who redirected their chants at Cory. In the front line, wearing an extravagant smirk, was Luis. He carried a rhinestone bullhorn, and his gold-painted face was glossy like a statuette except where the paint flecked on his stubble. Cory tried to take him aside, but the protestors encircled them.

  “You put this together to fuck me over!” Cory said.

  “Oh, hon, I hardly did anything,” Luis said. “Everyone was fighting this from the start. It figures that you never saw the blog. The NIMBYs were already lobbying for fewer Dolores Park events, and you scheduled the event on Pride Weekend. And then you got corporate sponsorship—for a DIY event! It is to laugh! By the way, your giant beer banner is facing Mission High School, which is illegal?”

  “This was approved fair and square.”

  “Whatever. We both know approval’s all about who’s willing to pay for permits and sit through boring meetings. That’s so you. Lame enough to ask for permission to gather on public space, establishment enough to take it over.” From this close up Cory could see the taut speedbag of his uvula. “All I did was send some emails pointing out that these groups had common cause. They ran with it. I only came to watch.” Luis took in a broad chestful of air, as if it were a luxury he could enjoy only on this particular afternoon.

  “You are”—Cory squeezed at imaginary cotton balls—“so unbelievably—”

  Luis held his palm out and blew a plume of brilliant dust into Cory’s face. She spat and saw glitter on her hand. Someone squished a wet finger into her ear, and she pushed it off as she stumbled away from laughter and photo-snapping. She couldn’t risk having the rent-a-cops disperse them; that would make them look good. Transferring glitter between her face and hands as she swatted it off, she saw Roopa at the edge of the crowd, dancing by the boombox. “Why are you here?” Cory said, approaching her.

  “8-Ball invited me,” Roopa said. Her pink pleather crop top gleamed under a fence-net shirt, and her leopard-print tights were sheer with fadedness. Her face was painted in angles of silver and black like a dazzle ship; across her stomach, in coruscating gold letters at the point of her dagger tattoo, was the word CUNT. “I had no idea this was your thing. Are you really taking corporate money?”

  “They’re only providing concessions. Look, are you here to protest?”

  “You should hear them out,” Roopa said, still somewhat dancing. “They’re really well organized.”

  “It’s not organized at all, there’s just lots of them. What’re they even accomplishing? It’s already happening.”

  “They’re making themselves heard through direct action. You gotta admire them for being here when they could be out partying at Pride.”

  “They are out partying. This is a party to them! You need to clear out. Take everyone with you,” Cory said, giving side-eye to Luis.

  “Sorry. Have to show solidarity.”

  “Okay, Roopa?” Cory said, shaping the resolve behind her words as she heard herself speak them. “If you don’t leave now, I am kicking you out of the house.”

  Roopa craned her head at various angles, as if to see around Cory’s bluff. “You’re serious.”

  Cory stuck her gaze down at the word CUNT. “I’m done with you. All the passive-aggressive posturing. Everything you call community and inclusion is just this motley blanket fort of privileged dickheads. You would never include anyone you disagreed with. Even when we back the same causes, you’re so smug and reductive you make me not want to back them. It’s Pharisee idiots like you who make progressive movements commit suicide every fucking time.”

  She hoped that Roopa would have exploded into a heap of bloody feathers at these words, but Roopa replied, “Everyone in Iniquity knows that you’re the negative one. Selfish, bossy, straight-up rude. Even now you’re ranting like a fascist. Why work for the people if you don’t like people? Because you use self-sacrifice to justify being nasty. That’s your truth.”

  “You and your friends,” Cory said. “You’re all out of the house.”

  Roopa tossed her hair. “You can’t kick us out.”

  “Except I can, because my name’s on the lease!”

  “The landlord likes us, and he’s dating my new roommate. You haven’t even been sleeping there. I can tell you right now that the consensus meeting will not go your way.”

  Cory experienced a profound absence—the sense of not standing on the sidewalk, and not turning away from Roopa, and not feeling the snivel fluking in her chest. She turned again and lifted her megaphone to her chapped lips. Her voice was felty and muffled. “Guys, thanks for coming out, I love seeing the community getting engaged! But we need to clear the sidewalk! I’m sorry!”

  “We have megaphones too, sweetie!” Luis’s voice crackled through his bullhorn, and he gave it a loud staticky smooch, drawing laughs. “This is a fake grassroots event! Look at that fucking banner! She’s a corporate shill! Are we going to leave?”

  “NO!” the crowd responded. Signs hoisted and twirled. Someone said, Get it girl.

  “What do we want?”

  The sidewalk faithful were divided on this, shouting in illegible unison.

  “Everyone!” Cory said, unable to hear herself even through the megaphone. “We all want the same thing! Stronger social programs! No more war! Marriage and wealth equality! Local f—”

  Cory’s vowels turned to air. She swallowed a painful teaspoon of spittle and tried again, only straining out a rasp through her puffy larynx. She looked around for Pascal and instead saw Linda jogging over, shifting her white sunglasses up. “Glittery,” she said, pointing at Cory’s face. “Everything okay?”

  Shaking her head hard, Cory clasped her throat and mouthed, Can’t talk. With her arms she made bulldozing gestures toward the protesters.

  “Want me to make them leave?” Linda said.

  Cory nodded. Linda declined Cory’s megaphone and walked back to where she’d come from. A minute later came what sounded like a shattering chain of transformer explosions. Cory hurried toward the noise, thinking that Linda had finally done it, her hipne
ss had finally radicalized into terrorism. The blare thundered from the PA. Linda was at her DJ table, munching her cuticle as Cory pointed at the speakers and made a throat-slashing gesture. People near the table cringed and covered their ears.

  “You wanted crowd dispersal!” Linda shouted. “I’m playing Autechre!”

  So far Recreate was succeeding—they’d drawn a big crowd, vendors were vending, people seemed entertained. It no longer required her. She couldn’t lose money now. But she didn’t want to win it. Here, for the majority losers and the lost, she silently declared an unwinnable war against success.

  She walked to the top of the park, powering her phone off and untangling her lanyard from her reefknots of hair, passing two nude handcuffed mimes being escorted to a squad car. The shadows of palm trees lengthened toward the distant high-rises, away from the amphitheater of sinking daylight. After an hour, the pack of protestors vanished without seeming to move, like smoke after a windless report of cannons. Sleep pulled her down, and when she woke the park was empty of everything but trash.

  6/9/08

  Henrik,

  JESUS CHRIST. Whatever you meant to do, you’ve turned my whiny little penetralium into a goddamn text. And not just any text: an epistolary. “Home-field advantage”? No, you’ve turned the form against me. It demands such goofy suspensions of disbelief—people sitting around, accidentally composing full novels in correspondence by inkwell and oil lamp, with scenes and dialogue and total recall. Fiction is already a rube’s game; the epistolary doesn’t even try. You swallow the lie up front. So maybe the epistolary’s perfect for us two, sitting in a room together for literally months without speaking. I need more belief than I deserve.

  I can’t handle people reading my stupid writing. I feel like I’ve just found a hidden camera in my toilet. Still, I’m glad you’re reaching out, even to mortify me—don’t pretend that’s not part of the deal. The moment I saw you on the doorstep, looking like a vengeful wraith with your white boxers and fucked-up hair, I knew: so art thou to revenge.

  Why do I lie? Trust me, I’d love to be taken at face value, stifle that academic impulse to disregard everything but subtext. But there’s no communication without performance without artifice. Sincerity is a fief of the subconscious, one you only stumble over by parapraxis. Here, with my elaborate botched lie, you’re getting more honesty than I could ever consciously give you. All failures are honest, including failures of honesty.

  I always knew narrative was oppressive—narrowing things down to one or even a thousand perspectives is still an abridgment of infinity. I have real pity for fictional characters, the clueless dupes of dramatic irony—especially the female creations of male novelists, the Lolitas, Caddies, Bovaries ontologically fucked with, their every foible delectably plated. Hester Prynne didn’t have to get preggers, Miss Mowcher didn’t have to have cankles, Winnie Verloc didn’t have to die—except to serve their narratives, of which they’re denied basic awareness. Vessels for the writer’s outlook, for the reader’s vicarious experience. For them there’s no nature or fortune: just guile. Forced to be interesting, plausible, coherent, deep, through the corrupt brokerage of a narrator. The better the novel, the more enchanting the characters, the more their mysteries are spread-eagled, the greater glory to their creator.

  You call it denial, resentment, narcissism. I call it Catholicism. No, I don’t think “‘writing something makes it real’”—I think reality is text-based. Not poststructurally—postscripturally. We lapsed Catholics have long had our reality debunked as fiction, but we’re still in the habit of worrying that Providence is hashing us out. Another reason to pity fictional characters: their Providence is a person, whose subjects are his objects. No matter how a character acts out—gets vengeance, gets closure, breaks it down, sees it through—it all serves narrative progress.

  Postmodernism was supposed to plug the leak. And it did: like a backed-up septic tank. The revenge of text on author. Tempting; but I can’t let go of the Self and become some layer cake of context. Not after all the shit this Self has gone through. Whose teeth are missing? Mine.

  Doesn’t this all sound suspiciously like the double bind of female embodiment—that having an observable body renders you nothing but; but concealing/erasing it demotes its status as a real thing? Either way agency is forfeit. I have better things to be than my body but I’d still like to have one.

  So I’ve picked Door #3: militant solipsism. Any imperative for the female educated American literary PYT—I’ll pass. I’ll play no part, no merit awarded by pity, no weakness forgiven by trauma. Predictability is suicide. Death before determination! Murder before membership! Execution before explanation! More than anything I refuse to make my past mean anything, to have the imposed cliché of mistreatment-by-shitty-dudes matter in any way. I eat my way around the universal. If style is fate and character is destiny, I’ll reject both. I want impossible self-authorship: to be sui generis, valuable in myself and flawed by my own hand. I’ll become the archangel of wry suffering, producing only ephemera, marginalia, juvenilia—a print so fine it doesn’t exist. Being unwritten, unread, hiding out in an apartment, in subtext, unnatural, unnurtured, refusing to be emplotted like a good little subject, that’s my whole deal now. One by one the positive ethics go out the window: first optimism, then eudaemonism, contentment, redemption, acceptance, coherence, finally existence.

  Now, to the charge of narcissism? Nolo contendere. All love is projection. Stuffing your experiences and hopes into whatever objet petit a, then embracing it. And don’t forget, dude, we’ve discussed how self-loathing is narcissistic too: dwelling over your shortcomings, insisting on your own worthlessness over everyone else’s objections. Hating is, after all, caring. So narcissism is fine by me.

  What I really fear is being an echoist. A helpless nymph who loses her voice for loving it too much, loses her body for loving a narcissist. Nothing but a dumb attention-hungry repetition of other people’s words. The cliché made flesh, then robbed of it. Wherever will collapses under fate it makes an echo. Is Ahab Ahab. I can’t go on I’ll go on. The horror the horror. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  Sorry for the comp lit paper. Here’s my point. For months I’ve been looking for somewhere to stay, then somewhere to go. Obeying the mandates of desire and transcendence, I’ve avoided the past, kept plowing ahead like the worst kind of reader, impatient for an ending. But I haven’t even begun.

  NOT ONLY HAD Will’s webcam picked up the Muni debacle and fed it live to the Sable homepage, but the highlight algorithm, smelling a hit, had automatically posted the incident, becoming the site’s most watched video in less than three days. Another passenger who’d recognized Will had recorded the fight on his phone and uploaded it to YouTube (Chinese Guy MELTDOWN on Bus during Live Webcast [dick slip at 2:31]). The videos circulated among the commentariat—speedily reposted, memed and macroed, and recut to an autotuned parody montage (CALIFORNIA CRAZIANS ***ORIGINAL VERSION***), a shameshow of fobby runts throwing tantrums in broken English. Will conceded it was pretty funny and well edited.

  The clips cleared eighty thousand views in a week—a piddling figure on the grand scale of virality, but far above Sable’s average traffic, and Will was certain that it skewed heavily local, so he’d be recognized if he went out in public, which he would certainly not. And the signal of his cock, transmuted into a data-bearing transmission, however degraded, would waft out into deep space for some advanced civilization to laugh at.

  To be so hideously remixed! Crushed down to a clip! So it went that the medium best suited to disposable content eternalized all. Will’s paisley-shaped cheek bruise in no way matched his humiliation, and Vanya was hopping. Her head an ominous lab flask boiling with some acid tincture she’d pour into his ear. Will pointed out that viewers liked drama, traffic had never been higher, and time-on-site, returning visitors, and click-throughs were all up. Vanya hit him with an organ-harvesting grimace—she was not looking to make a quick buck off a t
rashy reality show. She wanted to change the world by expressing herself, and therefore needed to prove to investors and sponsors that livecasting content was reliably on-message.

  Vanya agonized over whether to take down the video and thereby draw attention to it, or to allow it to linger atop the homepage’s Most Watched list. She called an all-hands video-conference to talk damage control, barring Will, though he eavesdropped over VNC. At three A.M. she took the website down for “scheduled maintenance” and made a short post on the Sable blog, hammering at her space bar as if it delivered electric shocks to Will: Aloha Sablers! By now you’ve probably seen the video everyone’s talking about, an embarrassing little “outtake”. . . She pointed out that Will’s chronic sleep disorders, a disability with which he continues to struggle, had made him irritable and disoriented, but there’s obviously no excuse for physical confrontation, so Will would spend a few weeks regrouping, and Vanya hoped that the community would continue to support them as we keep living our crazy random lives.

  “You said I have a sleep disorder?” Will said, standing at Vanya’s door, disbelieving his phone.

  “If I didn’t say something, people might’ve gotten this crazy idea that you pointlessly attack kids.”

  “That ‘kid’ had forty pounds on me.”

  “You were being psychotic!”

  Will straightened up, then reverted to a median slump. “So I have to take random shitstains calling me racial slurs?”

  “He wasn’t doing anything until you got up in his business. And even then, when you’re wearing a camera, you do not hit people. He could sue Sable. You could land in jail! Think they have Wi-Fi there? Baby, this is going to sound mean,” Vanya said, “but the show does not depend on you. You’re a cohost, not an equal partner.”

  “You’d regret it if I left.”

  “If that’s a threat, it’s hilarious. I’m as clean as cling wrap. If you go rogue, and I’m only saying that because that’s what it sounds like you’re threatening, you’ll only hurt yourself—god, you are just this habitual naysayer who can’t stand it when I succeed because you’ve gotten nowhere on your own!”